Every teacher wants his or her students to be honest. It's not just a question of fairness, it's a life lesson.

The challenge is that people seem to have little qualm about cheating--so long as the cheating is relatively slight: peeking at just an answer or two on a neighbor's quiz, for example. People want to maintain their own self-concept as an honest person, and small infractions allow them to think of themselves as "basically honest" while raking in the easy profit that dishonesty can afford (Mazar, Amir, & Ariely, 2008).

How can we encourage students to be more honest?

Christopher Bryan and his colleagues (Bryan, Adams, & Monin, 2012) had a clever approach to this problem. In talking to people about the subject they either referred to "cheating" or "being a cheater." Note that the latter term makes cheating part of one's identity. If people are ready to cheat because they are able to maintain their positive self image as a basically honest person, then reminding them that one who cheats is, in fact, a cheater, ought to make it harder to tell oneself that lie.

The test was simple. An experimenter approached people on the campus of Stanford university, and said

We’re interested in how common [cheating is/cheaters are] on collegecampuses. We’re going to play a game in which we will be able todetermine the approximate [rate of cheating/number of cheaters] inthe group as a whole but it will be impossible for us to know whetheryou’re [cheating/a cheater].

Subjects were asked to pick a number from 1 to 10, and then were told that if they had picked an even number they would receive $5, but if the number were odd, they would receive nothing.

When the experimenter used the word "cheater" 21% of subjects reported having picked an even number, but when "cheating" was used, 50% did. (Other research has shown that there is a strong bias to pick odd numbers in the task; that's why the rates are so low.)

Two further experiments replicated the effect.

Could teachers make use of this finding? The experiment was not, of course, conducted with K-12 students in an academic setting. But I suspect that the basic manipulation--subtly confronting the individual with the fact that even minor infractions does say something about his or her character--ought to work the same way with students in middle or high school. That said, it's worth pointing out that other data from Dan Ariely show that a reminder of the positive aspect of the person's moral spectrum also helps. In one well known experiment (Mazar & Ariely, 2006) asking subjects to name the ten commandments made them less likely to cheat. The interpretation is that recalling the ten commandments made people reflect on their moral values.

In short, the ideal is to remind people of their best side, their good intentions, and then remind them that cheating--sorry, being a cheater--is not compatible with their image of themselves.

Great piece, as usual, Dan. Just wanted to say that I have had this exact type of dialog with kids of all ages in many classrooms all around the country. And it works as advertised. I also run things on "the honor system" with a very simple approach to "dishonorable" behavior. Occasionally, when a kid slips up, we stop what we're doing, the kid comes up in front of the class and we talk a bit—as a classroom community. Not about “why” someone did something but about “who” we are. I’ve never had a kid tell me that he or she was a cheater. Sharing that with the class, and agreeing that none of us in the room have that identity, I never really have to worry about it again.

I’ve spent a lot of time doing many activities that encourage kids to explicitly describe their identities. Even the most disaffected have trouble “inhabiting” those ideas when we talk about them frankly as a class. And occasionally when they do give in to negative self-concepts, other kids step up and often point out the difference between behavior and identity.

Greg Delong

11/6/2012 01:35:18 pm

This intervention, while promising, seems like a last ditch effort to curb cheating. Wouldn't simply improving the learning experience for the student reduce cheating? It seems to me that often the incentive for cheating is to "survive" in a course or gain a bit of an edge.

I'm with Greg. Want to counteract cheating? Create more complex learning tasks/assessments for which it's difficult to cheat.

Side Q: Is it 'cheating' if you don't care about the thing in the first place? You might care as a teacher but I don't as a teacher. So if I just expend minimal effort to get it over with, is it 'cheating?'

Jay

11/9/2012 06:07:04 am

Or just create two unmarked versions and give them to every other row? ;)

What I like most about what Dan has written is that it teases out two parts of the issue: behavior and identity. Yet we can see that many of us want to talk more about a third part: the school environment. What’s interesting to me is that behavior and identity can be assessed independently of the school environment. The study described above isn’t even about cheating in an educational context; it’s about cheating in a simple game.

Attempts to reduce cheating in school by making school activities harder to cheat at have always failed. And I think that any of us who have worked with kids typically find an interesting psychological (read: identity-driven) back story as to why a particular kid may have cheated in a particular way at a particular time.

Focusing on the internal experience of children will, in most cases, I believe, produce better results. The best part of this identity-based approach is that it recognizes that cheating isn't just a school thing. Cheating happens everywhere. So making school less cheat-able does little to make kids less likely to cheat in other areas of their lives or to become adults who are less likely to cheat.

School is a wonderful opportunity to learn. Why not help kids learn not to cheat? The study above suggests a viable and even simple way of doing this. Why focus so narrowly on making sure kids don't cheat in school when, as the article above points out, we could focus instead on something that might reduce cheating in people regardless of age, environment, or context? And why do so many of us, especially those of us who work in schools, look at cheating as an issue related to the environment of school rather than as an issue related to the inner lives children?

Sometimes, I think, science tells us more about ourselves than it does about the thing it purports to study. And I often find that this is especially true when the topic of discussion is cheating at school.

Dan Willingham

11/10/2012 09:24:18 pm

@Greg, @Scott; unfortunately, Ariely's work seems to indicate that cheating is not a product of interest, it's a product of their being stakes in the outcome. If the outcomes is something that students care about, there is likely to be cheating--the pervasiveness is very high. To put it another way, people don't cheat on their taxes because doing your taxes is boring. They cheat on their taxes because they want money. But again, the amount that each individual cheats is small--10%, 15%, something like that.

This sort of makes sense, and yet it doesn't. For example, I think about the kind of work done by students at High Tech High or in the New Tech Network schools or the Big Picture schools. There are 'stakes in the outcome' and yet, because of the kind of work they're doing (hands-on projects, self-directed, etc.), I'm guessing there's little if any possibility of - or student interest in - 'cheating.'

Can students 'cheat' on higher-order thinking skills? Or only on lower-level stuff? And that's why I framed my reply around the 'boring' issue. Because I think mostly cheating is of concern for low-level thinking work that students don't care about because it's primarily been decontextualized and thus meaning has been removed...

Dan Willingham

11/12/2012 07:22:06 am

Two ways you can cheat on higher-order thinking skills:
1) Plagiarize someone's answer/thinking to a complex question
2) Forge data/citations for your own answer.
cf the scientific scandals widely reported in the last 12 months.